Since 2006 I have been employed as a consulting software developer by the National Research Council Aircraft Data Technologies (ADT) division (previously known as the Flight Recorder Playback Centre (FRPC)). My job has been to develop the software that the engineers use to analyze aircraft flight recorder data. This job has required advanced knowledge on how aircraft work, how their flight recorders record data, and on programming for Windows in object-oriented C++. While describing how aircraft flight recorders record their data and how my software is specially designed to accommodate them is outside the scope of this document, some of the features that make the software tools I have developed unique are listed below.

• The ability to quickly plot hundreds of hours of data for thousands of parameters.
• The supplemental ability to quickly plot the contents of CSV data files.
• A patented plotting algorithm that guarantees visual representation of every data point.
• Tools specialized for troubleshooting issues that arise during the processes of extracting the raw flight recorder data from the recorder, and then converting it to engineering units.
• Presentation features which allow the data to be quickly printed to standard letter-size pages or outputted to PDF.
• A comprehensive file history database which allows a user to sort their work history by aircraft type or data recording.
• Unlimited synchronized data cursors for comparing parameter datasets.
• Ability to change data time ranges at any time. Magnification tools are also provided.
• A multi-threaded data processing backend whose performance scales with as many processors as are available.
• The program is built with Qt C++ libraries which allow the software to be compiled for multiple platforms. Currently builds exist for Windows and Mac OSX.
• Network software authentication features
• Network data display features which allow the software to communicate with a web browser. This can be used to provide external data views for presentation purposes.
• Audio data plotting support for uncompressed audio formats. Designed to handle very large audio files (1GB and larger) and allows user to sync audio data to flight recorder data.
• Automatic graphs generation based on aircraft parameter databases.
• Many graph display customization features.